Course musings

Introduction

In looking back over the year in senior English, I start to think about the ideas that tie the two courses together.  The main one is philosophy, of course.  For after all, except for guilty pleasure or as a sociopathic primer, what else is the point of reading about evil except to understand its place in human nature and human society?   Why then take this idiosyncratic approach?  Partly the limitations of the medium: senior English.  Partly the desire to have a second-semester course that would build on the first-semester readings and ideas for those continuing, yet also be self-contained for those not so doing.

And why philosophy at all?   I read and think about philosophy in order to help me determine better how to live.  Others, of course, have other goals in mind.  Some claim the purpose of it is to help them understand the world around them.  Two thousand years ago, this aspect of philosophy was called “natural philosophy” and eventually morphed into what is known as science today.  Ultimately, I think that neither philosophy nor science can help one with ends as much as with means, but I suspect that philosophy can influence one’s perspective on appropriate ends more than science, which as I told a fourth-grader last week, generally only answers “how” questions (even when they are disguised as “why”).[1]

While Joey Cowan has said he enjoys philosophy because its pursuit sharpens his thinking and helps him to polish his rhetorical skills, I find that consideration of philosophical writing in general helps me grapple with the question of why I am here: not in a teleological sense, which I suppose religion answers, but in the existential sense of “now that I am here, what should I be doing with my life?”  Fairly early in my adult life I decided that the answer to the question was “To live in such a way that the world is a better place for my having been in it.”  I shan’t at this point justify that response since I think that for the most part ends are reached by faith as much as by anything else, though doubtless there are reasons behind the selection of certain leaps rather than others.

It didn’t take much reading of philosophers’ texts before I discovered a strong tendency to use words in ways that seemed to me contorted, unnecessarily obfuscatory rather than elucidatory.  So, for awhile I put aside philosophy (especially German texts) as either too difficult for me to understand or at least not worth the effort such understanding might take.  French philosophy was better, though Sartre’s reasoning seemed to me flawed in many places, what Rousseau said about the Noble Savage would be contradicted by anyone who spent time with young children, and Pascal’s emphasis on “the wager” seemed to me totally to miss the point of religion in seeking to explain it.  It was many years, unfortunately, before I discovered de Beauvoir.

British philosophy was more to my taste, particularly British empiricism.  Locke seemed to explain a number of things well if one accepted his premises, which I probably tended to do because of my having written a paper about his influence on the American constitution, which still seems to me quite a reasonable way to set up a country.

I wasn’t exposed to American philosophy until very recently, having been unaware of its existence, in fact, throughout my schooling.  The perpetuation of such ignorance, by the way, seems to me unwarrantable unless my teachers were (as seems likely in retrospect) equally ignorant.

Given my perspective  on philosophy—I read it to help me better determine how to live—two aspects of it seem paramount: what does it have to say about human nature and human life; and, how does one know one has gotten the essence of what the writer wanted to say?  The latter question no doubt reflects my problems with the OGs (Obfuscatory Germans), but more reading later, especially in postmodern literature (Borges having been my inadvertent mentor here) and deconstruction, supported the idea that determining what someone meant by his words was of central importance.[2]

First semester’s course this year dealt predominantly with the second question in the context of modernity: what was a modernist view of the world and people’s place in it?  How did the perspective that informed the end of the 19^th and at least the first half of the twentieth century change into that vague condition called postmodernism?  And how is the question of epistemology wrapped up in the other two questions?

Second semester started with a focus on “evil” in an individual, but that quickly became tied up in the question of societal needs versus individual freedoms, which is another way to look at the tension between social justice and individual rights.  The semester ended with a consideration of various factors that might explain evil actions or mindsets after a consideration of how religions have answered the question of evil (and by implication, goodness).  We detoured briefly into their perceptions of how they saw God (which, of course, says as much about the religionists as about God).  We looked at Dante’s conception of evil in his tour of hell; the ancient Eastern Mediterranean conception of the will of God and its application to human affair in the Books of Jonah and Job, the Sophoclean conception of good and evil in Ajax, and a French existentialist view of hell in No Exit.  Machiavelli provided a primer on the nature of power and social justice from a pragmatic point of view, Terry Eagleton provided many literary examples of different ways to look at evil in his work On Evil, and Rorty, Robinson, Brooks, and Eagleman provided shorter pieces on social, religious, and biological influences on extremes of human behavior.  Some of the Honors projects looked at psychological perspectives on human behavior (Milgram’s experiments, for instance) and at how morality played out in other works of literature (such as The Fall).

After that nine hundred word introduction, perhaps I should get to the point…

Thesis

 People are important.  Even though they annoy you periodically.  And harm you.  Even when the consequences of the harm are lasting.  Because homo sapiens is, after all, an essentially social creature and few of us can live fully at any significant remove from our herdmates.[3]

 Chapter 1

People are important.  They can provide an idealistic light in an otherwise dark world (The Intended in Heart of Darkness).  A quest shared is as much about the sharing as about the ostensible object of the quest (If on a winter’s night…).  Sex with others is fun, to the extent even of being a powerful drug (implication of the “unspeakable rites” in Heart of Darkness) or to distract from what turns out to be life-and-death business (K and Leni in The Trial; some chapters in If on…).  We can achieve more with others than by ourselves (Kurtz’s use of the natives in Heart of Darkness).  Even people as objects are more fun than other objects (Alex and his droogs prefer harming people to busting up property;  Kurtz likes the adoration of his fungible worshippers; K can’t seem to help condescending to everyone around him to make himself feel superior; although we don’t have much information, people as sex objects are sort of the best of both worlds: Alex gets a thrill out of rape; the “unspeakable rites” by implication are deeply sexual in Heart of Darkness; K sees both Leni and the washerwoman more as objects than as subjects like himself.  Garcin can’t leave his own private hell because he needs the approval of Inez even while she torments him.  Even in Machivelli, the mere fact of his writing a text on how to control people suggests that their presence is important.

Chapter 2

It is impossible to live for very long with people without being hurt by them to a greater or lesser extent.  There are multiple examples in Clockwork Orange of people who mind their own business and have Alex and his droogs wreak havoc in their worlds.  In The Trial, there are many people awaiting trial for reasons they cannot fathom, that seem to be merely for being human.  In The Stranger, Meursault is executed at least as much for his inhumanity as for the murder of the Arab (who is, in the world of The Stranger, very definitely a second-class being).  In Heart of Darkness, there is the plight of nearly every native mentioned in the story.  In Ajax, the greatest living hero of his time feels his honor impugned and justice perverted by those he sees as his inferiors.  Multiple chapters in If on a winter’s night show how dangerous others in the world around one are.  The Fall shows how even chance meetings with strangers can enpawn[4] one in the machinations of others. If the ostensible point in No Exit is that one’s hell is constructed of other people, the setting of the play suggests that merely to interact with others is to be in (or to construct for oneself) a hell.  Even The Real Inspector Hound suggests in a comically absurd way that other people are not to be trusted at any level and in any way.

Chapter 3

One certainly might consider the examples above, taken one at a time, to be as much examples of individual cluelessness as anything else. Taken collectively and supplemented by non-fictional insights, they can suggest a darker conclusion.   Hume’s Essay on Human Understanding, Saussure’s theory of language, Derrida’s deconstruction, all suggest significant inherent limits on the power of the individual to understand (and thus to control) the world.  Eagleman’s Incognito, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and Milgram’s experiments all suggest strong biological constraints on our power to understand and control even ourselves, as does Machiavelli’s pragmatic advice on government and even the population of much of Hell by Dante with sinners whose conduct sometimes seems almost unremarkable.  Taken all together, the readings suggest that there is probably not a way to avoid being harmed by others (arguably, even to avoid doing harm to others, but that’s a separate issue).

Chapter 4

Given the substance of chapters 2 and 3, are the benefits introduced in chapter 1 really enough to overcome the drawbacks just discussed? [5]

Both The Trial and Heart of Darkness exemplify the dangers of living too much in a world of one’s own construction, which is often the same as a world in which one sees others too much as objects rather than subjects.

While a certain portion of K’s problems stem from the inherent mysterious haziness of the world to which he awakes one day, his own objectification of those around him (Fraulein Burstner, Block, the audience at his speech, his own lawyer, even his uncle—and certainly Leni) makes it effectively impossible for him to understand the world in which he finds himself because he cannot see how it is constructed by others who (to use Jared’s phrase) see themselves as subjects even if K doesn’t.

Heart of Darkness shows many of the problems with objectification of others, from the whites’ treatment of the natives as means to an end (clean laundry for the Accountant, beasts of burden for the El Dorado expedition, ivory gatherers for Kurtz) to Kurtz’s seeing even his fellow Europeans as obstacles in his race to be the ultimate ivory collector.  Kurtz’s madness must be correlated with, if not stem from, his solipsistic world in which he has systematically isolated himself from those he might in other contexts be willing to see as fellow humans (the Europeans) and wherein his actual companions have become merely fungible worshippers to his own sense of divinity, however perverted that sense might be.[6]

 Chapter 5

Looked at from another perspective (a much rarer one), the real question is not why evil is so prevalent in the world, but why it is not more so.  Is that relative paucity a sign that people are better than we think?  Or less rational?  Or that that it can be pragmatic to be good?   Perhaps that depends on your perspective on self-interest and whether it’s long-term or short-term.  That would  be analogous to how the prisoner’s dilemma has different solutions depending on whether there are repeat interactions or not.  This idea seems more like an entire synthesis paper itself than a chapter in one, however.